Broomfield’s Level 3 accuses five U.S. Internet service providers of throttling traffic

Level 3 Communications is accusing five major U.S. Internet service providers and one in Europe of deliberately throttling the traffic that travel over their pipes in an effort to collect additional fees, reiterating claims it has raised in recent years.

Broomfield-based Level 3 operates one of the world’s largest Internet backbones, delivering content from Netflix, Major League Baseball and other clients to ISPs like Verizon and AT&T, which then distribute that content to end users.

Mark Taylor, vice president of content and media for Level 3, wrote in a blog post this week that six of the world’s largest ISPs are “deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers.”

Level 3 believes they’re degrading service in an effort to force Level 3 to pay more for delivering the content.

“Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe,” Taylor wrote. “There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market.”

Level 3’s beef with ISPs goes back several years. The company has settled its 2010 dispute with Comcast, so it’s likely the cable giant is not among the five that are alleged to be degrading service. Level 3 didn’t name the companies.

Internet network operators have so-called “peering agreements” that allow them to send traffic across each other’s pipes. ISPs argue that Level wants to send far more traffic than it’s taking back, a result of new deals it has cut with Netflix, MLB, Fox and others, and refuses to pay up for serving the additional content.

Level 3 argues that it is simply trying to deliver content requested by the ISPs’ paying customers.

“They are not allowing us to (fulfill) the requests their customers make for content,” Taylor wrote.

His blog post, which has drawn considerable attention in the tech community, surfaces at a time when the FCC is in the process of killing off the so-called net neutrality principle that all Internet content should be treated equally. The move will open the doors for ISPs to give premium access to content providers that are willing to pay for it.

Peering agreements, however, are outside the scope of the net neutrality rules that were adopted in 2010.

The United States pays far too much for far too slow Internet. The cartel controlling access to the Internet has extorted many times over what it would have cost to bring high-speed Internet to the US from its customers, but has failed to do so, and in its insane greed, it now would further drive up the cost of its existing inferior service. Revoke the corporate charters of the members of the cartel and seize their assets to build the network we need.

What prevented Level 3 from making the investments you claim to have harmed US productivity and freedoms?
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Like most corporates, when they whine, I suspect Level3 sees commercial advances in IP technology decreasing its role in the economic value chain. They sound like a middle man being squeezed out of revenue capture and therefore seek a government remedy to protect their declining position.
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I’ll note that a quick review of Level3 stock shows a good pop over the last year or two. Congratulations to the shareholders and employees who’ve deployed the capital and now benefit.

To crazed ideologues, no. Centralized control of many processes, whether by the government or other entities, is often more efficient than decentralized, private control. In the case of the Internet, there are any number of far more effective systems administered by governments than our system of corporate duopoly.

There is nothing crazed about it. You provide no evidence to back up your assertion. There are countless examples of the failures of centralized control such as the USSR, NHS in the UK, and even China is becoming more decentralized. The success of the Internet is because its architecture is decentralized. No one company or government owns it. I’m not going to get into a political discussion over a technical issue.

Andy he didn’t come right out and explicitly say that they are purposely harming traffic. Adding peering bandwidth is a complex situation. The value of peering comes from being able to interconnect with as many nodes as possible and the near-symmetrical sharing of traffic. It is the first point that ISP typically forget and focus on the second because the peering points are typically very asymmetric. Mark did not show the other direction of transmission on his graphs that show much less traffic coming back to Level 3. This is the sticking point when back-bone providers want to add more bandwidth. The ISP say hey, “Your’re not a peer because you send me more traffic than I send you.” In a way they look at this backwards but they control access to the customer so they perceive their value to companies like Level 3 and Cogent is the access to the end-user. The ISP typically forget that the other part of their value is that connectivity to all other points in the Internet. Congested links diminishes that value.

What fails to get mentioned is that good traffic engineering by delivering managed services and not just best-effort will allow for more efficient use of the bandwidth in the ISP and peering points. Throwing bandwidth at the Internet alone won’t solve the problem. We need to recognize that there are other parameters affecting time-sensitive traffic like voice and video as businesses have done for over a decade. If we move voice and video through the nodes before e-mail and web browsing, there is less congestion and everyone’s services improve. This is what FCC Chairman Wheeler is proposing and it will level the playing field for OTT providers to compete with the incumbents.

The ISP need to recognize that the value of their dumb pipe (they need to admit that fact as well) is in the unfettered ability to connect to any other end-point in the network (Metcalf’s Law) with relative ease. The entire Internet community needs to realize that all bits are not created equal and that we need to start managing their transport more efficiently based on the traffic type so all Internet users can have a quality experience.

Tamara Chuang covers personal technology and local tech news for The Denver Post. She previously spent 10 years doing the same thing for The Orange County Register before taking a hiatus to move here and become a SAHM to a precocious toddler.